Sunday Talk: Get Your Kitchen in Shape promotes healthy cooking

"Get Your Kitchen in Shape” is a program sponsored by the Partnership for a Healthier Louisiana and designed and hosted by
the Nutrition and Food Science Program of McNeese State University.

Eljeana Quebedeaux, director of the Didactic Program of Dietetics at McNeese talked with the American Press about the program which is underwritten by the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana Foundation when referencing.

What is the idea behind the ‘‘Get Your Kitchen in Shape’’ class? Is it a class or a lecture series?

Eljeana Quebedeaux:
It’s not a lecture. It’s hands-on. We want to engage and allow people
to experience. The whole objective of this class and
the whole idea of the class is to allow people to not use that
excuse, ‘‘I don’t know how to cook something healthy. I only
know how to cook it the way it’s not healthy.’’ We want them to
have hands-on experience for an understanding of what principles
are involved when you want to cook healthy.

How important these days is it to cook healthy?

It’s important for the quality of life,
it always has been. A lot of people don’t realize that what we put in
our mouth is
impacting not only our quality of living now, but definitely
chronic. They are definitely getting some research showing some
things even in child nutrition and even in the womb, how it can
affect us later with chronic diseases.

There’s a national epidemic of obesity.
So we are trying to address that. How can we still have tasty and
healthy food? What’s
the old saying? If it tastes good, it’s not good for you. Let’s
change that. That’s the whole concept because healthy really
does taste wonderful.

Along those lines, how does that particularly pertain to our diet and our culture here in Southwest Louisiana?

Last year we did eight sessions and our
whole idea is, Southwest Louisiana, what are we eating and how can we
make healthier
choices. So we did Mexican, we did Cajun twice, we did Italian of
course — all those things that we like in Southwest Louisiana.

This year we’re going to take four of
the things that we like in Southwest Louisiana: one’s going to be more
of a Italian-type
of dish. That’s going to be our first one. Our second one we’re
going to look at Mexican again. Our third one we’re actually
going to look at soul food. I know that some people think that
soul food and healthy can’t go together, but we believe that
there are some foods out there that can be very healthy soul food.
Cajun culture food is definitely going to be the fourth
one.

Is it hard to break the habit of cooking mustard greens, which are healthy, but some cooks are going to start it out with
a few pieces of bacon in the pot?

Let’s talk about that. I love doing that with my students.

We had some mustard greens and we
steamed them. Steamed, I get a portion of that and it’s probably about
25 calories. However,
it was really interesting because then I had another student who
was very experienced at making those mustard greens with
the bacon, the sausage — all those things we think about when we
think about mustard greens in the South. She cooked that
up and we got her recipe and I said, ‘‘OK, now we’re going to do a
nutritional analysis on this.’’ And what we found out is
if I have the same amount of portion of hers, it’s going to be 200
calories versus 25 of steamed. I don’t need to tell you
that the steamed didn’t get eaten. This one, we had enough
ingredients that she made it again and the college students ate
it up. So, yes, there’s a taste factor.

But again what fats are we putting in there? If we do have bacon, what if it’s a little leaner? What if we don’t put as much
fat in there? What if we do a few tweakings that says, “Yes, this is good’’, yet at the same time we’re also saying, ‘‘It
feels good, too’’.

So in a sense, it’s not so much of cutting everything out, it’s more of reducing and adaptive?

Yes, exactly. Very well put. We really
want to stress now in Louisiana and through the summer we’ve been able
to use fresh
fruits and vegetables, and this program really stresses using
fruits and vegetables. We will use as long we can in the season
use as much fresh as we can. However, as we go into the colder
seasons, it’s not the season for fresh fruits and vegetables.
We’ll have to work with the frozen and the canned fruits so we’re
going to be talking about that and when you talk about vegetables,
canned vegetables, you are talking a lot about sodium and some
preservatives.

Sodium is the big one. Now they are canning, and packaging abilities have improved so that we see canned, no salt added. So
we use them and we talk about lowering our sodium.

Cajuns and Southwest Louisiana like our
sodiums. We are not any different than anybody else but we do like it
in even more
amounts. So we are trying to learn ho to cut back on those and
provide some sodium alternative. There are a great array, without
naming any certain brand, there is an array of Creole seasonings
out there and some of them are adjusting now to reducing
sodium, if not having it at all. So we present some of those and
sometimes even have samples of those and use those.

What are the mistakes that cooks make and consumers make when it comes to food in Southwest Louisiana?

Sodium is one I just addressed.

The second one is fat and it’s very interesting because I’ve had this happen several times in my classes that we’ve already
done. I say, ‘‘OK, here’s the recipe.’’

‘‘Well, where’s the fat? Don’t I have to saute onions in fat?’’

‘‘No.’’

I had a chef came in and said, ‘‘You’re doing what? You are not adding butter before you do all of this?’’

And I said, ‘‘No, you don’t have to. Or less of that.’’

A lot of the Cajun cooks have learned to say let’s pour the oil or make sure there’s a layer of oil in the pan when all you
need is a tablespoon or two. So, I would say those are two areas that we address almost every time.

The third thing is adding those fruits and vegetables. When you look at the fast food or even fried at home, think of the
color. All of it is brown or white. Nothing usually has much color to it unless food coloring has been added.

What we’re trying to do is give you that natural color back in there with fruits and vegetables, getting us to when I sit
down to a plate, it’s colorful.

And then we also talk about the
portions of those. That’s another big key. If I’m going to have meat, we
usually have meat
in Southwest Louisiana with rice, with the meat on top of the
rice. Where’s the vegetables? Maybe there’s a little bit or
there’s mustard greens and if you didn’t put in the bacon and all
that, yeah, that might need to be a smaller portion. But
we need to have more fruits and vegetables on our plate. That’s
the anti-oxidants, that’s the vitamins and minerals, that’s
what makes us feel good, the fiber, all of those things.

As you counsel people, do you ever say that it’s OK to fall off the wagon once a week or once every two weeks and have what
we would consider more of a traditional meal?

Let me put it this way: We get in the
mind set that there is good food and there is bad food. There’s
definitely a spectrum
and continuum of this isn’t so good for you and this is even
better for you. I think we can put all foods in our diet or whatever
foods we want. There is some rules of exception for that. But for
the general population, we can have in moderation of some
of those things if we are getting it in balance.

Let me go back to the cooking class. What was the start of the coursework that you are doing?

This is with the Dare to Be Healthy
Program and grant with the Partnership of Southwest Louisiana. It is
one of the initiatives
that is there. The idea was born out of hearing a speaker quite a
few years back at a National Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
and they were talking about helping people understanding the
concept, having them taste. Sometimes when you have some conversation
with somebody, they look at you like, ‘‘That’s not going to
happen.’’ And yet if you go, ‘‘Come in my lab setting and let’s
practice this, let’s taste this,’’ it can make a lot of
difference. And we’ve seen it. It’s been exciting to see. I can give
you story after story on that from this summer.

I wanted to bring in the community and helping them see that. I want to see students beginning to get an understanding as
well of, ‘‘Hey, nutrition isn’t just about how the food goes in the body. It’s also about how can I get people to consume
the good food that makes them feel better or prevents chronic disease.’’

So, we actually this summer had the
dietetic interns come in and they are actually helping out in each of
the kitchens to
promote nutrition and helping the cooking as well. Now this time
around it will be the undergraduate students who will be
involved in that. So it will be part of their curriculum and it is
within a course that they are doing as part of an assignment.

For this program, when do you get started, how many weeks do you have and where to you meet and at what time?

We did it this summer eight times. So
we have another eight this year, starting this month in September. We
will go and probably
finish up in May this time. What we’re doing this time is we’re
going to have four that I’ve shared with you. Those four we
will take on the road in the spring. The four that we do now will
be in our lab here at McNeese as it was this summer. But
we will take it on the road to different communities.

So you are looking at four this fall, but four more this spring in the outlying communities?

Yes.

When do you start this month?

On (Tuesday), the 24th from 5:30 to 8:30 (p.m.) and it’s a time for family. We really want to stress that too, is that it’s
family. But it’s here in Gayle Hall.

How many people can you handle and normally what is the class size?

We can handle, we have six kitchens, we could do 36. The best is we’ve had 28 in there.

Let me backtrack. A minute ago, you said something about families, this is not a class just for the wife to attend?

No, I really want the whole family. It’s an outing, it’s like going to eat out except you get to have fun before and engage.

That’s another thing. A lot of our
families nowadays do not sit down together to eat a meal. They are
having to run everywhere,
but the other thing is they will run through the drive-thru, pick
up something and they might even eat it in the car on the
way home.

One of the things we want to encourage
because that also has been shown in research that those who sit around
the table and
eat meals together, the children tend to have less issues with
obesity. It not necessarily going to end all obesity, but the
statistics show us that.

We want to encourage that and one of
the things that is very challenging knowing as a mom myself, is when you
have little
kids and you have been working all day and you are already
mentally maxed out and you pick them up from the day care and they
are bouncing off the walls or school, whatever they are doing, and
you just want to go home and prop your feet up and so you
think, ‘‘Let me run through the drive-thru or pick something up
quick’’ when it could be a very teachable moment for kids
and engaging the child. There have been some Cajun cooks who have
some excellent Cajun principles that promote health that
haven’t been able to pass them on because no one was there to pass
it on to.

One of the first classes, we had a
family of six come in and beautiful children, not wild, not crazy. The
parents came (tired)
in. They had been at work all day and they had just picked the
kids up from school. They weren’t sure what was going to happen.
The kids were going, ‘‘What’s going on? What are we going to do?’’
We engaged them. Salad spinners are awesome little things.
We were promoting vegetables. And they had a blast. That allowed
the parents to begin to see what we were doing with them
as well as to allow them to do what they need to do.

The other thing that has been very
fascinating through the summer is that a lot of parents don’t allow kids
to have knives.
Well, its just like anything else, it’s a tool that you work with.
And yes, they need to be washed and shown how to use them.
So once you can, it’s pretty interesting how young they can learn
those skills. And of course that is very important with
fruits and vegetables. Using the scissors can be useful too.

We
talked obesity is almost epidemic in Southwest Louisiana, but it is
particularly alarming when you see the rate among children.
Food is a factor, but exercise also is too and we have a lot of
children that come home and sit at the computer and don’t
go outside and play for a variety of reasons. How can this class
and what they learn help in terms of being a lesson that
is being passed down to children?

I’ll try to address that two ways.
First, we became a society and the paradigm is changing, but we became a
society who allowed
others to prepare food and we just consume it. When you talk about
the calorie expenditure, someone fixes it for me, I don’t
expend much calories except to eat it. Where we once walked down
to get it at the local restaurant, we now drive there. So
that in itself when we start expended energy and having fun that
can make a difference.

And of course, anytime parents can
spend quality time, to me that’s a teachable moment. Kids don’t want
things, they want
time and it’s so important that we understand that. And this is a
way we are nourishing their physical bodies and at the same
token we are showing that quality time and love.

What is a misconception either about this program or diets and food consumption?

I think I’ve hit a lot of the myths,
but there is one other thing that we try to deal with and that is the
cost, that eating
healthy is costly and in reality some of our best nutrition,
nutrient rich foods are the least expensive. Cabbage is a very
good example. You go in there and of course there are some things
you are throwing away but there’s a lot of good there.

It takes time to prepare but how much
time does it take to stand in line to be in the drive-thru of a
restaurant? Think of
that time. I remember several years ago, the same idea, Mexican
food. I could prepare a meal faster, I could even go to the
grocery store and pick up the stuff and go home and prepare a meal
that was better for all of us at home probably faster
than I could drive to the restaurant, go through the drive-thru
and come home. And I could do better nutrition-wise — I could
lower the sodium, lower the fat, I could put in some fresh
veggies, all of that. And then fruit. And at that time there was
no fruit at fast food. ...

What didn’t we cover?

Family friendly quick meals are what
we’re looking at. We will actually have a meal prepared within an hour
with the whole
family helping out. And there are guidelines we try to stay within
our meal between 500 and 700 calories. We try to stay within
the guidelines of choose my plate and the dietary guidelines of
2010 of 25 to 35 percent fat, watching the saturated ones,
45 to 65 percent carbohydrate and 10 to 25 percent protein.

We also look at the sodium. We try to
keep it under a thousand milligrams and we’re even try to keep it lower,
down between
700 and 800 milligrams per meal. Fiber, we can consider that too,
because when you are adding more fruits and vegetables,
more whole grains, you should be adding more fiber. We’re also
talking about low-fat dairy. Those are the things we talk about,
alternatives to dairy.

We also talk about equipment used,
helping to see what equipment can help them prepare healthy meals, like
the salad spinner,
a blender — especially if you decide smoothies are your thing to
get some of these nutrients — knives, cutting boards, a food
processor, all of those things you can use.